


All's Fair in Love and War

by Shorti



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Maria Hill, F/M, Fluff, No additional tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:26:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6793489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shorti/pseuds/Shorti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint’s seen this kind of thing before in his many years in the circus. It’s a phenomenon he’s termed Confined Dick Syndrome and judging by the complaints, Steve and Tony have it bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All's Fair in Love and War

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Shield, Arrow and Suit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6714778) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 



> @avengersmanic15 I hope you don't mind that I've taken inspiration from your fic summary and run with it.

Clint’s seen this kind of thing before in his many years in the circus. He and Barney even suffered some of the symptoms when they weren’t careful. It’s a phenomenon he’s termed _Confined Dick Syndrome_ whereby two men are stuck in a common space for too long and all hell breaks loose because of stupidity. Judging by the complaints, Steve and Tony have it bad.

Clint is officially retired. He only visits the compound every now and again to check in, but that doesn’t stop them from treating him like an Agony Aunt every time they see him.

“Do you see what I have to put up with?” Tony says, shoving a spread sheet in front of Clint’s face almost as soon as he walks in the door.

“What am I looking at here?”

“A roster! A god damn cooking and cleaning roster. He let go of the help! Says we need to be self-sufficient.  Like we’re in the army or something. I pay for everything! I should be allowed to do what I want in my own house! Can you believe that?”

Clint can believe it.

Steve’s not the type to make others do for him what he can easily do for himself. Laura’s implemented something similar at home, albeit with gold stars and pocket money as reward and time out as punishment. Not, no reward besides a job well done and mission privileges suspended as punishment.

Of course Tony retaliates. It’s not in his nature to let sleeping dogs lie. Steve is the closest thing to authority in the house and Tony wouldn’t be Tony if he didn’t push against it. Still, the mess he makes in the kitchen when it’s Steve’s turn to clean up is slightly overkill.

“What am I supposed to do?” Steve asks. He paces the floor in front of Clint like a man at the end of his last tether. “He’s a senior officer and he’s acting like a spoiled child. I can’t have him setting a bad example for Wanda.”

Clint’s pretty sure Wanda has a sound bullshit detector, especially since she’s taken to shadowing Maria whenever the other woman is in. But he knows when to keep his mouth shut.

“Maybe you two should sit down and have an adult conversation about this,” Clint offers.

“I’ve tried! He refuses to listen to reason! I set up a meeting time and even got Romanoff to send him an email invitation but he didn’t show up!”

It escalates and tit for tat takes on a whole new meaning.

Tony brings home a stray dog that leaves presents all over the carpet. Steve makes good on his threat of punishment and disables then hides the Mark XLVI so that Tony can’t participate on their next mission.

The others, when they’re not directly inconvenienced, find the whole thing highly amusing. This too is part of the fallout of _Confined Dick Syndrome_. Those who are in the vicinity either wash their hands of it or add fuel to the fire.

Wanda, Rhodey and Vision are of the former persuasion. Nat and Sam veer towards the latter and when Clint tries to intervene, they gently hold him back.

“C’mon, Clint,” Nat says. “I wanna see where this goes!”

“They’re going to end up killing each other,” Clint says.

Sam just laughs and goes back to his video game.

In  a last ditch effort to talk sense into Tony, Steve breaks the unspoken rule of ego warfare and brings in Pepper.

“This is not good,” Wanda observes as the team gather outside Tony’s office, listening to him justify what he’s done and hearing Pepper’s voice not raise a single octave but seeing the devastating effect of her visit.

All is seemingly quiet for a few days, but Clint has an uneasy feeling it’s the calm before the storm.

A week later Clint is called in for an extraction mission that requires his particular skill set. He arrives back at the compound with Maria to find Steve in a state of alarming Hulkishness.

“Evacuate if you know what’s good for you,” Sam says as he high tails it in the other direction.

They walk into Steve’s office just as he’s donning his helmet.

“You don’t have a mission, Cap,” Maria says. She leans in the doorway like a cat sunning, but the ominous gleam in her eyes is almost more frightening than the way Steve cracks his knuckles.

“Oh, I have a mission alright,” Steve says. “Crush, kill, destroy.”

It’s only then that Clint hears the audio playing on Steve’s laptop and he understands why Steve’s whole face has turned a brighter shade of beetroot. With his mind occupied on revenge, Steve’s not quick enough to stop Clint from sidestepping him and checking out the source. Maria’s lips twitch as she too recognises the sound. She can’t help herself from taking a peek either.

“I can’t get it to stop,” Steve explains. "He's bugged the laptop."

Clint’s seen more explicit stuff in his time, but he recognises that the pornography playing on rotation isn’t the problem. It’s the subtext and the subject line involving Maria that’s pushing Steve to the limit. He might not be allowed to be protective of her but Steve’s got traditional sensibilities and he’s insanely protective of their relationship. It's almost as though Steve can't believe she's agreed to be with him and is afraid something like this will make her run.

Tony’s just about walked up and slapped Steve in the face with a chain mail glove.

The duel is on.

Except Maria isn’t fazed in the slightest.

“That is so fake,” she says, pointing to things Clint can’t even look at with her in the room. “And that’s not even humanely possible!”

Then she body blocks Steve from going out the door.

“At ease, Soldier.”

“But…”

“Hand over the shield.” Steve doesn’t have a chance to argue as she wrestles it from him. “Stop paying him attention and he’ll get bored.”

“We shouldn’t have to put up with this! He needs to learn there are consequences to his actions.”

She raises her eyebrow at the irony and then Steve is banished to the gym to work off steam.

“You know you’re going to have to deal with this eventually don’t you?” Clint tells her. “Pepper can come and go but you’re stuck here.”

He should have run when he had the opportunity because the look she throws him could melt the skin off his hide.

Clint doesn’t leave anything to chance though. He’s had too much experience with _Confined Dick Syndrome_ and he’s worried Maria’s too busy with real work to implement anything in time. So he takes matters into his own hands and gives her a little push.

The odour is fleeting at first, but the heat from the kitchen and the electrical equipment soon magnifies the rotting fish smell. The air conditioning does the rest.

Maria’s heels clicking on the tiles is like the stroke of a clock to a death row inmate. Wanda follows her at a steady sprint, unable to keep up with the woman on the mission.

She finds Tony and Steve in the lounge, wrestling for the remote and arguing about whether they should watch the History Channel or E!

Out of the corner of his eye, Clint spies Nat with a device in her hands that seems to have control of the black box as well. He suspects the constant channel change might not be restricted to the two men.

Maria rips the plug from the TV and then clears her throat.

The silence that follows is deafening.

Steve and Tony freeze in position, their palms caught in stasis, pushing each others faces away.

“This ends now. If you act like children I’ll treat you like children. See this remote?” she holds up a tiny, flat, black remote on a lanyard around her neck. Wanda comes up beside Maria with a metal bracelet around her wrist that blinks in shades of green and red. “I press a button and Wanda zaps one of you. Raise you voice: zap. Step out of line: zap.”

“That’s torture!” Tony argues.

“Let’s call it reparation for the pain you’ve put the rest of us through. I can get to you anytime, anywhere. I can make you pee your pants at a press conference if I like. So grow up or face the consequences!”

She turns and then spins back around. “I want that smell gone in the next hour.”

Nobody moves for a full ten minutes after she leaves. Then Nat points to her watch. “Tick, tock gentlemen.”

Clint doesn’t tell them where he stashed the salmon heads. It’s too much fun watching them scramble around the air conditioning ducts. Well, Tony scrambles because Steve is too big to fit.

On his way home, Clint can’t help admiring Maria's work. She does fed up and scary better than anyone he knows.

The countermeasure for _Confined Dick Syndrome?_ As with most things, it’s a woman.  

               


End file.
